1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [67]
For more than a decade, Sahagún and other religious authorities regarded the conversion as atriumph. He initially began his reconstruction of the debate to commemorate it. But he never published the manuscript, because he was slowly coming to believe that the Church’s efforts in New Spain had been a failure. Despite lip-service devotion to the Gospel, the Mexica remained outside Christendom, as do some of their descendants to this day.
Sahagún is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for decades to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other missionaries, he amassed an archive on the Mexica and their neighbors—dynastic histories, dictionaries of native languages, descriptions of customs, collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings and sculpture—unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka. From it emerges, in almost full detail, a group portrait of a kind that is usually obscured by loss.
Masters of power politics, engineers of genius, the Mexica were also upstarts and pretenders, arrivistes who falsely claimed a brilliant line of descent. They are best known for assembling the greatest empire ever seen in Mesoamerica. But their finest accomplishment may have been the creation of a remarkable intellectual tradition, one that like the Greeks began with the questions of lyric poets and then went on to distinct schools of inquiry associated with elite academies.
Mexica histories begin by relating their migration to the Basin of Mexico. Fringed by mountains, the basin was about a hundred miles long from north to south and perhaps half that size from east to west. At its center was Lake Texcoco, a fifty-mile-long volcanic lake with exceptionally clear, clean water. Around the time of Christ, a small village on its northeast periphery named Teotihuacan emerged as a military power. During the next four centuries its realm steadily expanded until it ruled directly over much of central Mexico and indirectly, through puppet governments, as far south as Guatemala. Its eponymous capital then may have had 200,000 inhabitants, enormous at the time; its ruins, an hour by bus from Mexico City, are among the few remnants of the ancient world that today don’t seem small.
The city was organized around the Avenue of the Dead, a miles-long, north-south boulevard that cut straight as an ax stroke across the landscape. From the northern end of the avenue rose the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, each as big as the biggest Egyptian pyramids. To their south sprawled the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where the empire’s rulers, as ruthless and preoccupied with national glory as so many Bismarcks, considered what to do with their soldiers. Despite the empire’s fame and power, its history is still little known; archaeologists do not know what language its people spoke, or even its proper name (“Teotihuacan” was coined centuries later). It had writing of some kind, though it seems not to have been used much; in any case the script has not been deciphered.
At about 200 feet tall and 700 feet on a side, the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan is the world’s third-largest pyramid. It was built in stages in the second and third centuries A.D. atop a deep, 300-foot cave created by a lava tube that may have represented the place where humankind emerged onto the earth. The pyramid and the rest of the city are oriented on a rectilinear grid 15° 25” from true north, a direction that may have aligned with the cave mouth.
Teotihuacan fell in the eighth century for reasons yet unknown, but left an enduring mark in central Mexico. Three hundred years afterward the rising Toltec styled themselves its heirs. They, too, built an empire, which fell amid internal dissension in about 1200